Gotta like the fact that @Kabam Miike is ignoring this thread. Won’t even respond to say one thing
44.9k views 1.1k comments seems pretty hard to ignore. Hopefully it is not being ignored @Kabam Miike #buffsentry please and thank you.
It's not being ignored, but there is nothing to add here. We've already said that we've taken your feedback to the team, and it will be up to them what they will do with that information. We will not post again until we have something to add, or there is a question that hasn't come up before that requires our attention.
Where on their to do list is this ranked?
That's not how game development generally works. There is no such TODO list with rankings. Every millisecond of content development time, and then some, is already allocated to a queue of stuff being developed, and because most content requires different developers from different groups to work on it that queue cannot easily be changed without disrupting the development process completely. Whatever feedback we provide for Sentry will be something the developers think about, but are unlikely to be able to act upon until either some free time opens up in the schedule, which happens randomly, or when time is explicitly scheduled in to review the character, which could be months away or more.
So probably by the time my retirement happens is when they’ll fix him. Got it
Gotta like the fact that @Kabam Miike is ignoring this thread. Won’t even respond to say one thing
44.9k views 1.1k comments seems pretty hard to ignore. Hopefully it is not being ignored @Kabam Miike #buffsentry please and thank you.
It's not being ignored, but there is nothing to add here. We've already said that we've taken your feedback to the team, and it will be up to them what they will do with that information. We will not post again until we have something to add, or there is a question that hasn't come up before that requires our attention.
Where on their to do list is this ranked?
That's not how game development generally works. There is no such TODO list with rankings. Every millisecond of content development time, and then some, is already allocated to a queue of stuff being developed, and because most content requires different developers from different groups to work on it that queue cannot easily be changed without disrupting the development process completely. Whatever feedback we provide for Sentry will be something the developers think about, but are unlikely to be able to act upon until either some free time opens up in the schedule, which happens randomly, or when time is explicitly scheduled in to review the character, which could be months away or more.
So probably by the time my retirement happens is when they’ll fix him. Got it
I suppose it depends on when you intend to retire. It is entirely possible they might reexamine Sentry after they reexamine the champions they are likely look at now within the closed betas. If not, it could be a long time after that.
Gotta like the fact that @Kabam Miike is ignoring this thread. Won’t even respond to say one thing
44.9k views 1.1k comments seems pretty hard to ignore. Hopefully it is not being ignored @Kabam Miike #buffsentry please and thank you.
It's not being ignored, but there is nothing to add here. We've already said that we've taken your feedback to the team, and it will be up to them what they will do with that information. We will not post again until we have something to add, or there is a question that hasn't come up before that requires our attention.
Where on their to do list is this ranked?
That's not how game development generally works. There is no such TODO list with rankings. Every millisecond of content development time, and then some, is already allocated to a queue of stuff being developed, and because most content requires different developers from different groups to work on it that queue cannot easily be changed without disrupting the development process completely. Whatever feedback we provide for Sentry will be something the developers think about, but are unlikely to be able to act upon until either some free time opens up in the schedule, which happens randomly, or when time is explicitly scheduled in to review the character, which could be months away or more.
So probably by the time my retirement happens is when they’ll fix him. Got it
I suppose it depends on when you intend to retire. It is entirely possible they might reexamine Sentry after they reexamine the champions they are likely look at now within the closed betas. If not, it could be a long time after that.
A little frustrating, but what can you do? It's not sad in real life because it's just a game, but for those of us who can see what they were trying to do but just misread how bad RNG can be with just a 30 percent chance to proc, it's just....I don't know. It's just a little sad in that regard because the character looks great, plays great.
Gotta like the fact that @Kabam Miike is ignoring this thread. Won’t even respond to say one thing
44.9k views 1.1k comments seems pretty hard to ignore. Hopefully it is not being ignored @Kabam Miike #buffsentry please and thank you.
It's not being ignored, but there is nothing to add here. We've already said that we've taken your feedback to the team, and it will be up to them what they will do with that information. We will not post again until we have something to add, or there is a question that hasn't come up before that requires our attention.
Where on their to do list is this ranked?
That's not how game development generally works. There is no such TODO list with rankings. Every millisecond of content development time, and then some, is already allocated to a queue of stuff being developed, and because most content requires different developers from different groups to work on it that queue cannot easily be changed without disrupting the development process completely. Whatever feedback we provide for Sentry will be something the developers think about, but are unlikely to be able to act upon until either some free time opens up in the schedule, which happens randomly, or when time is explicitly scheduled in to review the character, which could be months away or more.
So probably by the time my retirement happens is when they’ll fix him. Got it
I suppose it depends on when you intend to retire. It is entirely possible they might reexamine Sentry after they reexamine the champions they are likely look at now within the closed betas. If not, it could be a long time after that.
A little frustrating, but what can you do? It's not sad in real life because it's just a game, but for those of us who can see what they were trying to do but just misread how bad RNG can be with just a 30 percent chance to proc, it's just....I don't know. It's just a little sad in that regard because the character looks great, plays great.
If I let bother me every time a game developer made a algorithmic system error or a mathematical error I would be in an insane asylum by now. Unless you're the economist that analyzes Eve Online's economy internally or whoever sold their soul to make the Starcraft balance spreadsheets, you probably did at least one thing that made me want to rip your brain out of your head and pound it on the pavement like in Robocop 2.
Fact is, there are game design schools that are mostly academic and useless, and there are trade organizations that are interesting to a point but less useful to rank and file developers as they are to managers and producers. But the average game developer (working on systems or functional entities) is being asked to create work product that is fundamentally congruent to medium complexity mechanical engineering, with none of the tools of the discipline.
We don't have all the numbers handy, but the devs do. The question of how much damage Sentry does is something that any second or third year engineering student should be able to determine with precision. The fact that game developers think this is something you *can't* calculate, that you can only really measure with real game players, is something game developers say because they lack the engineering background to perform those calculations. When the game mechanics do not allow for a closed form calculation, they always allow for monte carlo estimation (because the *game* is essentially a monte carlo simulation). You should be able to determine that with an afternoon of Python.
What bothers me most is not when game developers get numbers wrong. What bothers me is how easy it would be to get it right, for someone with the right math and engineering toolset. What *really* bothers me is that most game developers believe this to be false, that the math somehow eliminates some of the "magic" of game development. Which, when you are staring at Excel all day, seems to me to be an inexplicable thought.
Gotta like the fact that @Kabam Miike is ignoring this thread. Won’t even respond to say one thing
44.9k views 1.1k comments seems pretty hard to ignore. Hopefully it is not being ignored @Kabam Miike #buffsentry please and thank you.
It's not being ignored, but there is nothing to add here. We've already said that we've taken your feedback to the team, and it will be up to them what they will do with that information. We will not post again until we have something to add, or there is a question that hasn't come up before that requires our attention.
Where on their to do list is this ranked?
That's not how game development generally works. There is no such TODO list with rankings. Every millisecond of content development time, and then some, is already allocated to a queue of stuff being developed, and because most content requires different developers from different groups to work on it that queue cannot easily be changed without disrupting the development process completely. Whatever feedback we provide for Sentry will be something the developers think about, but are unlikely to be able to act upon until either some free time opens up in the schedule, which happens randomly, or when time is explicitly scheduled in to review the character, which could be months away or more.
So probably by the time my retirement happens is when they’ll fix him. Got it
I suppose it depends on when you intend to retire. It is entirely possible they might reexamine Sentry after they reexamine the champions they are likely look at now within the closed betas. If not, it could be a long time after that.
A little frustrating, but what can you do? It's not sad in real life because it's just a game, but for those of us who can see what they were trying to do but just misread how bad RNG can be with just a 30 percent chance to proc, it's just....I don't know. It's just a little sad in that regard because the character looks great, plays great.
If I let bother me every time a game developer made a algorithmic system error or a mathematical error I would be in an insane asylum by now. Unless you're the economist that analyzes Eve Online's economy internally or whoever sold their soul to make the Starcraft balance spreadsheets, you probably did at least one thing that made me want to rip your brain out of your head and pound it on the pavement like in Robocop 2.
Fact is, there are game design schools that are mostly academic and useless, and there are trade organizations that are interesting to a point but less useful to rank and file developers as they are to managers and producers. But the average game developer (working on systems or functional entities) is being asked to create work product that is fundamentally congruent to medium complexity mechanical engineering, with none of the tools of the discipline.
We don't have all the numbers handy, but the devs do. The question of how much damage Sentry does is something that any second or third year engineering student should be able to determine with precision. The fact that game developers think this is something you *can't* calculate, that you can only really measure with real game players, is something game developers say because they lack the engineering background to perform those calculations. When the game mechanics do not allow for a closed form calculation, they always allow for monte carlo estimation (because the *game* is essentially a monte carlo simulation). You should be able to determine that with an afternoon of Python.
What bothers me most is not when game developers get numbers wrong. What bothers me is how easy it would be to get it right, for someone with the right math and engineering toolset. What *really* bothers me is that most game developers believe this to be false, that the math somehow eliminates some of the "magic" of game development. Which, when you are staring at Excel all day, seems to me to be an inexplicable thought.
I have done some light coding, created some basic programs -- really basic. Of course, one of the first projects that you get is "dice roll."
That's how I learned about how RNG works, and obviously, this game is light years beyond anything I could ever have done. But I will never forget my instructor's words about when you code a probability: "Never think about how often you want it to happen. Think about how often it won't."
Obviously, with Sentry, the thought was that 30 percent would proc enough. Unfortunately in reality, it procs exactly like it was coded: 70 percent of the time, nothing happens. And with each of them individual events where the percentage doesn't change...ouch.
Pleaseassume that Sentry is weaker than it should and fix Sentry. This champion received so much praise before it was released and this false expectation made many consumers spend a lot of money to have Sentry. We do not complain for nothing, no one is complaining about Modok or the Taskmaster, the question is only with Sentry. It seems that Kaban is lacking humility to recognize that Sentry should be improved. This is a shame because this game is very good, just need to respect more consumers!
Gotta like the fact that @Kabam Miike is ignoring this thread. Won’t even respond to say one thing
44.9k views 1.1k comments seems pretty hard to ignore. Hopefully it is not being ignored @Kabam Miike #buffsentry please and thank you.
It's not being ignored, but there is nothing to add here. We've already said that we've taken your feedback to the team, and it will be up to them what they will do with that information. We will not post again until we have something to add, or there is a question that hasn't come up before that requires our attention.
Where on their to do list is this ranked?
That's not how game development generally works. There is no such TODO list with rankings. Every millisecond of content development time, and then some, is already allocated to a queue of stuff being developed, and because most content requires different developers from different groups to work on it that queue cannot easily be changed without disrupting the development process completely. Whatever feedback we provide for Sentry will be something the developers think about, but are unlikely to be able to act upon until either some free time opens up in the schedule, which happens randomly, or when time is explicitly scheduled in to review the character, which could be months away or more.
So probably by the time my retirement happens is when they’ll fix him. Got it
I suppose it depends on when you intend to retire. It is entirely possible they might reexamine Sentry after they reexamine the champions they are likely look at now within the closed betas. If not, it could be a long time after that.
A little frustrating, but what can you do? It's not sad in real life because it's just a game, but for those of us who can see what they were trying to do but just misread how bad RNG can be with just a 30 percent chance to proc, it's just....I don't know. It's just a little sad in that regard because the character looks great, plays great.
If I let bother me every time a game developer made a algorithmic system error or a mathematical error I would be in an insane asylum by now. Unless you're the economist that analyzes Eve Online's economy internally or whoever sold their soul to make the Starcraft balance spreadsheets, you probably did at least one thing that made me want to rip your brain out of your head and pound it on the pavement like in Robocop 2.
Fact is, there are game design schools that are mostly academic and useless, and there are trade organizations that are interesting to a point but less useful to rank and file developers as they are to managers and producers. But the average game developer (working on systems or functional entities) is being asked to create work product that is fundamentally congruent to medium complexity mechanical engineering, with none of the tools of the discipline.
We don't have all the numbers handy, but the devs do. The question of how much damage Sentry does is something that any second or third year engineering student should be able to determine with precision. The fact that game developers think this is something you *can't* calculate, that you can only really measure with real game players, is something game developers say because they lack the engineering background to perform those calculations. When the game mechanics do not allow for a closed form calculation, they always allow for monte carlo estimation (because the *game* is essentially a monte carlo simulation). You should be able to determine that with an afternoon of Python.
What bothers me most is not when game developers get numbers wrong. What bothers me is how easy it would be to get it right, for someone with the right math and engineering toolset. What *really* bothers me is that most game developers believe this to be false, that the math somehow eliminates some of the "magic" of game development. Which, when you are staring at Excel all day, seems to me to be an inexplicable thought.
I have done some light coding, created some basic programs -- really basic. Of course, one of the first projects that you get is "dice roll."
That's how I learned about how RNG works, and obviously, this game is light years beyond anything I could ever have done. But I will never forget my instructor's words about when you code a probability: "Never think about how often you want it to happen. Think about how often it won't."
Obviously, with Sentry, the thought was that 30 percent would proc enough. Unfortunately in reality, it procs exactly like it was coded: 70 percent of the time, nothing happens. And with each of them individual events where the percentage doesn't change...ouch.
I don't think anything like that happened. This smells like something got tweaked downward at the last minute. It doesn't "feel" like it was designed with these numbers. This looks like someone decided the original numbers were too high, guestimated how much too high, and then cut them by the same amount, and was just completely wrong.
When Cryptic Studios was building City of Heroes, they discovered during beta testing at the last minute that the defense power set was too strong. Without getting into technical details, hitting a target required passing a 50% random roll. Defense lowered that number, and the defense set allowed -45% defense which lowered the tohit roll to 5%. Which means only one in twenty swings would hit the target. That allowed you to pretty much tank the whole game. So the designer at the last minute and with no testing decided to cut that effective number in half, from about 45% to about 22.5%. But that didn't reduce the effectiveness in half, it destroyed the set. Now, instead of 5% of swings hitting, 27.5% of swings would hit. That's 550% as much damage. You haven't experienced the nerf hammer until you've seen the amount of damage you take increase by a factor of five. In fact, for mathy reasons the actual net effectiveness of the ability when fighting strong content would actually drop to practically zero.
That would be an interesting anecdote, if it wasn't for the fact that Cryptic Studios eventually went on to make Champions Online, another superhero themed MMO, and literally one week before launch they changed all of the carefully crafted and beta tested defense numbers and in the process completely wrecked *all* of the damage mitigation sets. They did the same crazy thing twice.
This is not a disease unique to Cryptic. DCUO did the same thing, The Matrix Online did something kind of related to that, SWTOR did this a couple of times. Every MMO I've played appears to have done this more than once: make a last minute number tweak that they think does one thing when it does something completely and dramatically different, because math. It feels unlikely to me that Sentry in its current form could have passed internal testing. But I would not be surprised if Sentry originally had like 70% chance to proc and testing showed it to be too high, so someone decided to cut the number to 30% and release because there wasn't enough time to test. Without being there, there's no way to say, but that seems like a more probable error than literally being unaware of how bad the numbers are now.
Gotta like the fact that @Kabam Miike is ignoring this thread. Won’t even respond to say one thing
44.9k views 1.1k comments seems pretty hard to ignore. Hopefully it is not being ignored @Kabam Miike #buffsentry please and thank you.
It's not being ignored, but there is nothing to add here. We've already said that we've taken your feedback to the team, and it will be up to them what they will do with that information. We will not post again until we have something to add, or there is a question that hasn't come up before that requires our attention.
Where on their to do list is this ranked?
That's not how game development generally works. There is no such TODO list with rankings. Every millisecond of content development time, and then some, is already allocated to a queue of stuff being developed, and because most content requires different developers from different groups to work on it that queue cannot easily be changed without disrupting the development process completely. Whatever feedback we provide for Sentry will be something the developers think about, but are unlikely to be able to act upon until either some free time opens up in the schedule, which happens randomly, or when time is explicitly scheduled in to review the character, which could be months away or more.
So probably by the time my retirement happens is when they’ll fix him. Got it
I suppose it depends on when you intend to retire. It is entirely possible they might reexamine Sentry after they reexamine the champions they are likely look at now within the closed betas. If not, it could be a long time after that.
A little frustrating, but what can you do? It's not sad in real life because it's just a game, but for those of us who can see what they were trying to do but just misread how bad RNG can be with just a 30 percent chance to proc, it's just....I don't know. It's just a little sad in that regard because the character looks great, plays great.
If I let bother me every time a game developer made a algorithmic system error or a mathematical error I would be in an insane asylum by now. Unless you're the economist that analyzes Eve Online's economy internally or whoever sold their soul to make the Starcraft balance spreadsheets, you probably did at least one thing that made me want to rip your brain out of your head and pound it on the pavement like in Robocop 2.
Fact is, there are game design schools that are mostly academic and useless, and there are trade organizations that are interesting to a point but less useful to rank and file developers as they are to managers and producers. But the average game developer (working on systems or functional entities) is being asked to create work product that is fundamentally congruent to medium complexity mechanical engineering, with none of the tools of the discipline.
We don't have all the numbers handy, but the devs do. The question of how much damage Sentry does is something that any second or third year engineering student should be able to determine with precision. The fact that game developers think this is something you *can't* calculate, that you can only really measure with real game players, is something game developers say because they lack the engineering background to perform those calculations. When the game mechanics do not allow for a closed form calculation, they always allow for monte carlo estimation (because the *game* is essentially a monte carlo simulation). You should be able to determine that with an afternoon of Python.
What bothers me most is not when game developers get numbers wrong. What bothers me is how easy it would be to get it right, for someone with the right math and engineering toolset. What *really* bothers me is that most game developers believe this to be false, that the math somehow eliminates some of the "magic" of game development. Which, when you are staring at Excel all day, seems to me to be an inexplicable thought.
I have done some light coding, created some basic programs -- really basic. Of course, one of the first projects that you get is "dice roll."
That's how I learned about how RNG works, and obviously, this game is light years beyond anything I could ever have done. But I will never forget my instructor's words about when you code a probability: "Never think about how often you want it to happen. Think about how often it won't."
Obviously, with Sentry, the thought was that 30 percent would proc enough. Unfortunately in reality, it procs exactly like it was coded: 70 percent of the time, nothing happens. And with each of them individual events where the percentage doesn't change...ouch.
I don't think anything like that happened. This smells like something got tweaked downward at the last minute. It doesn't "feel" like it was designed with these numbers. This looks like someone decided the original numbers were too high, guestimated how much too high, and then cut them by the same amount, and was just completely wrong.
When Cryptic Studios was building City of Heroes, they discovered during beta testing at the last minute that the defense power set was too strong. Without getting into technical details, hitting a target required passing a 50% random roll. Defense lowered that number, and the defense set allowed -45% defense which lowered the tohit roll to 5%. Which means only one in twenty swings would hit the target. That allowed you to pretty much tank the whole game. So the designer at the last minute and with no testing decided to cut that effective number in half, from about 45% to about 22.5%. But that didn't reduce the effectiveness in half, it destroyed the set. Now, instead of 5% of swings hitting, 27.5% of swings would hit. That's 550% as much damage. You haven't experienced the nerf hammer until you've seen the amount of damage you take increase by a factor of five. In fact, for mathy reasons the actual net effectiveness of the ability when fighting strong content would actually drop to practically zero.
That would be an interesting anecdote, if it wasn't for the fact that Cryptic Studios eventually went on to make Champions Online, another superhero themed MMO, and literally one week before launch they changed all of the carefully crafted and beta tested defense numbers and in the process completely wrecked *all* of the damage mitigation sets. They did the same crazy thing twice.
This is not a disease unique to Cryptic. DCUO did the same thing, The Matrix Online did something kind of related to that, SWTOR did this a couple of times. Every MMO I've played appears to have done this more than once: make a last minute number tweak that they think does one thing when it does something completely and dramatically different, because math. It feels unlikely to me that Sentry in its current form could have passed internal testing. But I would not be surprised if Sentry originally had like 70% chance to proc and testing showed it to be too high, so someone decided to cut the number to 30% and release because there wasn't enough time to test. Without being there, there's no way to say, but that seems like a more probable error than literally being unaware of how bad the numbers are now.
I really enjoy your stories from that side of the house. Thanks for taking the time.
Gotta like the fact that @Kabam Miike is ignoring this thread. Won’t even respond to say one thing
44.9k views 1.1k comments seems pretty hard to ignore. Hopefully it is not being ignored @Kabam Miike #buffsentry please and thank you.
It's not being ignored, but there is nothing to add here. We've already said that we've taken your feedback to the team, and it will be up to them what they will do with that information. We will not post again until we have something to add, or there is a question that hasn't come up before that requires our attention.
Thanks for responding @Kabam Miike... but the disappointment in this champ is very high. Sounds like this thread will continue and you may be mentioned in a few more conversations before it’s done. Hopefully they fix him. I haven’t seen any conversations on this site with numbers even close to this one. Thanks again. #buffsentry
I honestly don't think we got the intended version of Sentry. They probably nerfed him to hard before release and didn't properly test their changes. Here's the real problem, kabam rarely admits mistakes unless the community forces them to. There's not enough pressure on them right now to fix him. They seem to prioritize pushing new content rather than fixing existing problems. The game is full of bugs right now and after 2 months without an update we get very few fixes but lots of new stuff. With all that I have little hope that Sentry will be fixed, the can will just get kicked down the road until they are ready. It doesn't seem to matter that every time they do something like this it hurts the trust between them and their customers. If anything will dooms this game it will be how they treat their base.
Gotta like the fact that @Kabam Miike is ignoring this thread. Won’t even respond to say one thing
44.9k views 1.1k comments seems pretty hard to ignore. Hopefully it is not being ignored @Kabam Miike #buffsentry please and thank you.
It's not being ignored, but there is nothing to add here. We've already said that we've taken your feedback to the team, and it will be up to them what they will do with that information. We will not post again until we have something to add, or there is a question that hasn't come up before that requires our attention.
Nothing to add? How about you admit that your statement that he is “good for long fights” was false????
Not like your gonna respond @Kabam Miike
Easy.. He at least responded, so that's something. We have some tiny sliver of hope I suppose.
Gotta like the fact that @Kabam Miike is ignoring this thread. Won’t even respond to say one thing
44.9k views 1.1k comments seems pretty hard to ignore. Hopefully it is not being ignored @Kabam Miike #buffsentry please and thank you.
It's not being ignored, but there is nothing to add here. We've already said that we've taken your feedback to the team, and it will be up to them what they will do with that information. We will not post again until we have something to add, or there is a question that hasn't come up before that requires our attention.
Nothing to add? How about you admit that your statement that he is “good for long fights” was false????
Not like your gonna respond @Kabam Miike
Easy.. He at least responded, so that's something. We have some tiny sliver of hope I suppose.
Easy? He basically told us to F off. “We will not post again” implying this is for nothing, which it probably is.
Gotta like the fact that @Kabam Miike is ignoring this thread. Won’t even respond to say one thing
44.9k views 1.1k comments seems pretty hard to ignore. Hopefully it is not being ignored @Kabam Miike #buffsentry please and thank you.
It's not being ignored, but there is nothing to add here. We've already said that we've taken your feedback to the team, and it will be up to them what they will do with that information. We will not post again until we have something to add, or there is a question that hasn't come up before that requires our attention.
Thanks for responding @Kabam Miike... but the disappointment in this champ is very high. Sounds like this thread will continue and you may be mentioned in a few more conversations before it’s done. Hopefully they fix him. I haven’t seen any conversations on this site with numbers even close to this one. Thanks again. #buffsentry
Yes this has gotten a lot of attention from us players and I actually do think that when he says they took it to the game team they are mentioning the massive number of comments and posts. At the very least I hope we can get a synergy. The synergy to void was a slap in the face!
Gotta like the fact that @Kabam Miike is ignoring this thread. Won’t even respond to say one thing
44.9k views 1.1k comments seems pretty hard to ignore. Hopefully it is not being ignored @Kabam Miike #buffsentry please and thank you.
It's not being ignored, but there is nothing to add here. We've already said that we've taken your feedback to the team, and it will be up to them what they will do with that information. We will not post again until we have something to add, or there is a question that hasn't come up before that requires our attention.
Nothing to add? How about you admit that your statement that he is “good for long fights” was false????
Not like your gonna respond @Kabam Miike
Easy.. He at least responded, so that's something. We have some tiny sliver of hope I suppose.
Easy? He basically told us to F off. “We will not post again” implying this is for nothing, which it probably is.
Well you could see it that way. I'd like to see it in another way. It all depends on what we think. I'm not saying we should keep quiet. No way. This thread will not stop. But at least he said that they've taken it to the game team. After all what we want, is for them to improve Sentry and the game team, they're the ones who will do so.
Gotta like the fact that @Kabam Miike is ignoring this thread. Won’t even respond to say one thing
44.9k views 1.1k comments seems pretty hard to ignore. Hopefully it is not being ignored @Kabam Miike #buffsentry please and thank you.
It's not being ignored, but there is nothing to add here. We've already said that we've taken your feedback to the team, and it will be up to them what they will do with that information. We will not post again until we have something to add, or there is a question that hasn't come up before that requires our attention.
Well thats sounds promising, at least the developers are aware of the large disappoint in Sentry and the huge disatisfaction that the players feel. I think thats the whole reason for this contined post. Maybe they will surprise us.
Here's something that I'm surprised hasn't been brought up yet. Why was 2 separate champs created for sentry and void? Why not just make 1 champ that switched between the 2 since they are 2 aspects of the same person. That would possibly been better than the current sentry. At least half the time he would have been decent.
This is how I thought originally they would be. But it would still be a bad idea to have half a champion be useless
@DNA3000 so since you are familiar with this field, do programmers/coders even look at these threads? or is this just a lost cause
Actual programmers? Only if they have a lot of free time. I think you mean content developers, who in general know nothing about programming. And they also tend not to read the official forums a lot, simply due to time constraints. It is not their job to read the forums. It is the moderators' job to read the forums, and as a secondary responsibility they will mark threads that they believe contain interesting information or posts for the developers to read. We often ridicule the mods when they say they've passed comments on to the developers, but that's one of the primary ways we indirectly reach the developers: the mods decide we've made a good case and they direct the developers to review the forum posts regarding that. We're shooting ourselves in the foot every time we make light of that.
When you ask if this is a lost cause, I think players need to be realistic about what feedback can do. In terms of drawing the developers attention to a problem, I think these posts have already succeeded at that. I'm reasonably certain the developers know that players are dissatisfied with Sentry, and they have specific quantitative information about in what ways Sentry is seen to underperform. That information has made it to the developers. And continued reasonable discussion about the problems with Sentry can preserve mind share about those problems for extended periods of time. However, if players believe that there exists some number of posts or some threshold of complaints that can cause the developers to stop what they are doing and work on Sentry immediately, then that is mostly a lost cause because the threshold required to do that is higher than the number of players of the game who are even aware that a champion called Sentry exists. For all intents and purposes, players cannot trigger that kind of action most of the time.
If that's your definition of success, its a very high hurdle to attempt achieve. I think you have to realize that this would be an incredibly high hurdle for one of the *developers* to make it over. Which is to say, if the actual developer who designed Sentry believed everything that was said in this thread, agreed with the premise of Sentry needing to be changed, and wanted to make the kinds of changes proposed in this thread, and wanted to make those changes immediately - say, within the next month - the odds of *him* succeeding would be very small.
@DNA3000 so since you are familiar with this field, do programmers/coders even look at these threads? or is this just a lost cause
Actual programmers? Only if they have a lot of free time. I think you mean content developers, who in general know nothing about programming. And they also tend not to read the official forums a lot, simply due to time constraints. It is not their job to read the forums. It is the moderators' job to read the forums, and as a secondary responsibility they will mark threads that they believe contain interesting information or posts for the developers to read. We often ridicule the mods when they say they've passed comments on to the developers, but that's one of the primary ways we indirectly reach the developers: the mods decide we've made a good case and they direct the developers to review the forum posts regarding that. We're shooting ourselves in the foot every time we make light of that.
When you ask if this is a lost cause, I think players need to be realistic about what feedback can do. In terms of drawing the developers attention to a problem, I think these posts have already succeeded at that. I'm reasonably certain the developers know that players are dissatisfied with Sentry, and they have specific quantitative information about in what ways Sentry is seen to underperform. That information has made it to the developers. And continued reasonable discussion about the problems with Sentry can preserve mind share about those problems for extended periods of time. However, if players believe that there exists some number of posts or some threshold of complaints that can cause the developers to stop what they are doing and work on Sentry immediately, then that is mostly a lost cause because the threshold required to do that is higher than the number of players of the game who are even aware that a champion called Sentry exists. For all intents and purposes, players cannot trigger that kind of action most of the time.
If that's your definition of success, its a very high hurdle to attempt achieve. I think you have to realize that this would be an incredibly high hurdle for one of the *developers* to make it over. Which is to say, if the actual developer who designed Sentry believed everything that was said in this thread, agreed with the premise of Sentry needing to be changed, and wanted to make the kinds of changes proposed in this thread, and wanted to make those changes immediately - say, within the next month - the odds of *him* succeeding would be very small.
Thanks for grounding us. I was starting to feel like I was only moments away from being able to edit the game files directly XD.
But for real I think you are right but as players we do have limited means to influence the game. We can either give feedback on the forums or stop playing. I feel like the continuation of this thread is similar to peaceful protests. Leaving the game is hunger strike.
I will try one more method, bribery. I personally will guarantee kabam an Odin purchase if they fix sentry...lol.
@DNA3000 so since you are familiar with this field, do programmers/coders even look at these threads? or is this just a lost cause
Actual programmers? Only if they have a lot of free time. I think you mean content developers, who in general know nothing about programming. And they also tend not to read the official forums a lot, simply due to time constraints. It is not their job to read the forums. It is the moderators' job to read the forums, and as a secondary responsibility they will mark threads that they believe contain interesting information or posts for the developers to read. We often ridicule the mods when they say they've passed comments on to the developers, but that's one of the primary ways we indirectly reach the developers: the mods decide we've made a good case and they direct the developers to review the forum posts regarding that. We're shooting ourselves in the foot every time we make light of that.
When you ask if this is a lost cause, I think players need to be realistic about what feedback can do. In terms of drawing the developers attention to a problem, I think these posts have already succeeded at that. I'm reasonably certain the developers know that players are dissatisfied with Sentry, and they have specific quantitative information about in what ways Sentry is seen to underperform. That information has made it to the developers. And continued reasonable discussion about the problems with Sentry can preserve mind share about those problems for extended periods of time. However, if players believe that there exists some number of posts or some threshold of complaints that can cause the developers to stop what they are doing and work on Sentry immediately, then that is mostly a lost cause because the threshold required to do that is higher than the number of players of the game who are even aware that a champion called Sentry exists. For all intents and purposes, players cannot trigger that kind of action most of the time.
If that's your definition of success, its a very high hurdle to attempt achieve. I think you have to realize that this would be an incredibly high hurdle for one of the *developers* to make it over. Which is to say, if the actual developer who designed Sentry believed everything that was said in this thread, agreed with the premise of Sentry needing to be changed, and wanted to make the kinds of changes proposed in this thread, and wanted to make those changes immediately - say, within the next month - the odds of *him* succeeding would be very small.
Thanks for grounding us. I was starting to feel like I was only moments away from being able to edit the game files directly XD.
But for real I think you are right but as players we do have limited means to influence the game. We can either give feedback on the forums or stop playing. I feel like the continuation of this thread is similar to peaceful protests. Leaving the game is hunger strike.
I will try one more method, bribery. I personally will guarantee kabam an Odin purchase if they fix sentry...lol.
@DNA3000 so since you are familiar with this field, do programmers/coders even look at these threads? or is this just a lost cause
Actual programmers? Only if they have a lot of free time. I think you mean content developers, who in general know nothing about programming. And they also tend not to read the official forums a lot, simply due to time constraints. It is not their job to read the forums. It is the moderators' job to read the forums, and as a secondary responsibility they will mark threads that they believe contain interesting information or posts for the developers to read. We often ridicule the mods when they say they've passed comments on to the developers, but that's one of the primary ways we indirectly reach the developers: the mods decide we've made a good case and they direct the developers to review the forum posts regarding that. We're shooting ourselves in the foot every time we make light of that.
When you ask if this is a lost cause, I think players need to be realistic about what feedback can do. In terms of drawing the developers attention to a problem, I think these posts have already succeeded at that. I'm reasonably certain the developers know that players are dissatisfied with Sentry, and they have specific quantitative information about in what ways Sentry is seen to underperform. That information has made it to the developers. And continued reasonable discussion about the problems with Sentry can preserve mind share about those problems for extended periods of time. However, if players believe that there exists some number of posts or some threshold of complaints that can cause the developers to stop what they are doing and work on Sentry immediately, then that is mostly a lost cause because the threshold required to do that is higher than the number of players of the game who are even aware that a champion called Sentry exists. For all intents and purposes, players cannot trigger that kind of action most of the time.
If that's your definition of success, its a very high hurdle to attempt achieve. I think you have to realize that this would be an incredibly high hurdle for one of the *developers* to make it over. Which is to say, if the actual developer who designed Sentry believed everything that was said in this thread, agreed with the premise of Sentry needing to be changed, and wanted to make the kinds of changes proposed in this thread, and wanted to make those changes immediately - say, within the next month - the odds of *him* succeeding would be very small.
Thanks for grounding us. I was starting to feel like I was only moments away from being able to edit the game files directly XD.
But for real I think you are right but as players we do have limited means to influence the game. We can either give feedback on the forums or stop playing. I feel like the continuation of this thread is similar to peaceful protests. Leaving the game is hunger strike.
I will try one more method, bribery. I personally will guarantee kabam an Odin purchase if they fix sentry...lol.
Comments
So probably by the time my retirement happens is when they’ll fix him. Got it
I suppose it depends on when you intend to retire. It is entirely possible they might reexamine Sentry after they reexamine the champions they are likely look at now within the closed betas. If not, it could be a long time after that.
A little frustrating, but what can you do? It's not sad in real life because it's just a game, but for those of us who can see what they were trying to do but just misread how bad RNG can be with just a 30 percent chance to proc, it's just....I don't know. It's just a little sad in that regard because the character looks great, plays great.
If I let bother me every time a game developer made a algorithmic system error or a mathematical error I would be in an insane asylum by now. Unless you're the economist that analyzes Eve Online's economy internally or whoever sold their soul to make the Starcraft balance spreadsheets, you probably did at least one thing that made me want to rip your brain out of your head and pound it on the pavement like in Robocop 2.
Fact is, there are game design schools that are mostly academic and useless, and there are trade organizations that are interesting to a point but less useful to rank and file developers as they are to managers and producers. But the average game developer (working on systems or functional entities) is being asked to create work product that is fundamentally congruent to medium complexity mechanical engineering, with none of the tools of the discipline.
We don't have all the numbers handy, but the devs do. The question of how much damage Sentry does is something that any second or third year engineering student should be able to determine with precision. The fact that game developers think this is something you *can't* calculate, that you can only really measure with real game players, is something game developers say because they lack the engineering background to perform those calculations. When the game mechanics do not allow for a closed form calculation, they always allow for monte carlo estimation (because the *game* is essentially a monte carlo simulation). You should be able to determine that with an afternoon of Python.
What bothers me most is not when game developers get numbers wrong. What bothers me is how easy it would be to get it right, for someone with the right math and engineering toolset. What *really* bothers me is that most game developers believe this to be false, that the math somehow eliminates some of the "magic" of game development. Which, when you are staring at Excel all day, seems to me to be an inexplicable thought.
I have done some light coding, created some basic programs -- really basic. Of course, one of the first projects that you get is "dice roll."
That's how I learned about how RNG works, and obviously, this game is light years beyond anything I could ever have done. But I will never forget my instructor's words about when you code a probability: "Never think about how often you want it to happen. Think about how often it won't."
Obviously, with Sentry, the thought was that 30 percent would proc enough. Unfortunately in reality, it procs exactly like it was coded: 70 percent of the time, nothing happens. And with each of them individual events where the percentage doesn't change...ouch.
I don't think anything like that happened. This smells like something got tweaked downward at the last minute. It doesn't "feel" like it was designed with these numbers. This looks like someone decided the original numbers were too high, guestimated how much too high, and then cut them by the same amount, and was just completely wrong.
When Cryptic Studios was building City of Heroes, they discovered during beta testing at the last minute that the defense power set was too strong. Without getting into technical details, hitting a target required passing a 50% random roll. Defense lowered that number, and the defense set allowed -45% defense which lowered the tohit roll to 5%. Which means only one in twenty swings would hit the target. That allowed you to pretty much tank the whole game. So the designer at the last minute and with no testing decided to cut that effective number in half, from about 45% to about 22.5%. But that didn't reduce the effectiveness in half, it destroyed the set. Now, instead of 5% of swings hitting, 27.5% of swings would hit. That's 550% as much damage. You haven't experienced the nerf hammer until you've seen the amount of damage you take increase by a factor of five. In fact, for mathy reasons the actual net effectiveness of the ability when fighting strong content would actually drop to practically zero.
That would be an interesting anecdote, if it wasn't for the fact that Cryptic Studios eventually went on to make Champions Online, another superhero themed MMO, and literally one week before launch they changed all of the carefully crafted and beta tested defense numbers and in the process completely wrecked *all* of the damage mitigation sets. They did the same crazy thing twice.
This is not a disease unique to Cryptic. DCUO did the same thing, The Matrix Online did something kind of related to that, SWTOR did this a couple of times. Every MMO I've played appears to have done this more than once: make a last minute number tweak that they think does one thing when it does something completely and dramatically different, because math. It feels unlikely to me that Sentry in its current form could have passed internal testing. But I would not be surprised if Sentry originally had like 70% chance to proc and testing showed it to be too high, so someone decided to cut the number to 30% and release because there wasn't enough time to test. Without being there, there's no way to say, but that seems like a more probable error than literally being unaware of how bad the numbers are now.
Let’s keep it going. #stillalive
I really enjoy your stories from that side of the house. Thanks for taking the time.
Thanks for responding @Kabam Miike... but the disappointment in this champ is very high. Sounds like this thread will continue and you may be mentioned in a few more conversations before it’s done. Hopefully they fix him. I haven’t seen any conversations on this site with numbers even close to this one. Thanks again. #buffsentry
Easy.. He at least responded, so that's something. We have some tiny sliver of hope I suppose.
Easy? He basically told us to F off. “We will not post again” implying this is for nothing, which it probably is.
Yes this has gotten a lot of attention from us players and I actually do think that when he says they took it to the game team they are mentioning the massive number of comments and posts. At the very least I hope we can get a synergy. The synergy to void was a slap in the face!
Well you could see it that way. I'd like to see it in another way. It all depends on what we think. I'm not saying we should keep quiet. No way. This thread will not stop. But at least he said that they've taken it to the game team. After all what we want, is for them to improve Sentry and the game team, they're the ones who will do so.
Well thats sounds promising, at least the developers are aware of the large disappoint in Sentry and the huge disatisfaction that the players feel. I think thats the whole reason for this contined post. Maybe they will surprise us.
This is how I thought originally they would be. But it would still be a bad idea to have half a champion be useless
Actual programmers? Only if they have a lot of free time. I think you mean content developers, who in general know nothing about programming. And they also tend not to read the official forums a lot, simply due to time constraints. It is not their job to read the forums. It is the moderators' job to read the forums, and as a secondary responsibility they will mark threads that they believe contain interesting information or posts for the developers to read. We often ridicule the mods when they say they've passed comments on to the developers, but that's one of the primary ways we indirectly reach the developers: the mods decide we've made a good case and they direct the developers to review the forum posts regarding that. We're shooting ourselves in the foot every time we make light of that.
When you ask if this is a lost cause, I think players need to be realistic about what feedback can do. In terms of drawing the developers attention to a problem, I think these posts have already succeeded at that. I'm reasonably certain the developers know that players are dissatisfied with Sentry, and they have specific quantitative information about in what ways Sentry is seen to underperform. That information has made it to the developers. And continued reasonable discussion about the problems with Sentry can preserve mind share about those problems for extended periods of time. However, if players believe that there exists some number of posts or some threshold of complaints that can cause the developers to stop what they are doing and work on Sentry immediately, then that is mostly a lost cause because the threshold required to do that is higher than the number of players of the game who are even aware that a champion called Sentry exists. For all intents and purposes, players cannot trigger that kind of action most of the time.
If that's your definition of success, its a very high hurdle to attempt achieve. I think you have to realize that this would be an incredibly high hurdle for one of the *developers* to make it over. Which is to say, if the actual developer who designed Sentry believed everything that was said in this thread, agreed with the premise of Sentry needing to be changed, and wanted to make the kinds of changes proposed in this thread, and wanted to make those changes immediately - say, within the next month - the odds of *him* succeeding would be very small.
Thanks for grounding us. I was starting to feel like I was only moments away from being able to edit the game files directly XD.
But for real I think you are right but as players we do have limited means to influence the game. We can either give feedback on the forums or stop playing. I feel like the continuation of this thread is similar to peaceful protests. Leaving the game is hunger strike.
I will try one more method, bribery. I personally will guarantee kabam an Odin purchase if they fix sentry...lol.
LOL I'll drop a BP chest on that
Hahaha I’m in also! #buffsentry